Why are men hornier than women

We’ve all heard the narrative – men are naturally promiscuous, libidinous, horny devils who simply need to have sex all the time, right? And women… well. We’re meant to be chaste and respectable, and less likely to want to, ahem, screw all the time.

Tell that to our 17th century ancestors.

The common idea of the male sex drive exceeding that of women is actually a rather recent invention. Not that you’d know it without engaging in some heavy research. Which Faramerz Dabhoiwala thankfully did for us in his book The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution.

Take, for example, Robert Burton, the author of the iconic book The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): “Of women’s unnatural, insatiable lust, what country, what village doth not complain?”

Or William Wycherley, in his play The Country Wife (1675): “Why should women have more invention in love than men? It can only be, because they have more desires, more soliciting passions, more lust, and more of the devil.”

During the Stuart period, it was commonly held that women were far more sexual (and thus sinful) than men.

As Dabhoiwala explains, “the most extreme, misogynist version of this argument asserted that women’s minds were so corrupt, their wombs so ravenous, their ‘amorous fire’ so voracious, that truly, ‘if they dared, all women would be whores’.”

The idea likely stemmed from Eve, whose sinful conduct with the serpent apparently brought about the ‘fall of man’. Though one could argue that Adam likely pushed Eve out of the Garden of Eden first to cushion his fall, chivalry be damned. As, taking the [horrifying] miracle of childbirth into account, she certainly seemed to receive the raw end of the deal. Perhaps it should more honestly be called the ‘fall of woman’.

The view of naturally lustful women gradually began to change in the 18th century, and the idea of men as the hornier gender has continued right through to the current day, achieving an almost indisputable status as a commonly held truth.

But, in fact, its origins are socially constructed.

Modern science is still trying to make sense of sex and sexuality, and will no doubt bring numerous conflicting insights over the coming years, but which gender is hornier than the other is likely simply a reflection of the dominant narrative of the time.

TAGGED IN

• Sex /
• Sexuality /
• Lust /
• Love /
• History /
• Societal Narratives /
• Social Construction /

Randy blokes lead the way when it comes to the bedroom in long term relationships, a new study has claimed
 

By Alex Matthews

17th May 2019, 11:51 am

Updated: 17th May 2019, 12:58 pm

MEN initiate sex THREE times more often than women but are only likely to get it if she makes the first move.

Randy blokes lead the way when it comes to antics in the bedroom during long-term relationships, a new study has claimed.

However, sex happens more when girls take the initiative and it is them who set the limits rather than lads.

Psychologists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology also found that passion is the most important factor to a healthy sexual relationship.

The team at NTNU looked at a number of factors including how happy people are in their relationship, how committed they feel to their partner, how intimate they are, how much they trust each other and the love between them.

PASSION IS KEY

Postdoctoral fellow Trond Viggo Grøntvedt wrote in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences: “Passion in the relationship is of great importance for intercourse frequency.

“Passion is actually the only one of these factors that matters.

“We didn’t find any association between any of the other aspects and how often people have sex in couple relationships.”

Passion in the relationship is of great importance for intercourse frequency. Passion is actually the only one of these factors that matters

Postdoctoral fellow Trond Viggo Grøntvedt

The psychologists studied people from 19 to 31, with all involved in romantic heterosexual relationships.

They found a woman’s attitude to casual sex can also play a key role in how frequent intercourse can be in a relationship.

The study read: “Intercourse was more frequent in couples where women reported less restricted attitudes, while men’s level of sociosexuality had no effect on intercourse frequency in any of the models.

“These novel findings suggest that while men in general might desire sex more, in this sample from a highly egalitarian nation, men might be compromising more than women do.”

The team also found that the longer the relationship, the less the couple had sex.

In particular they discovered, rather unsurprisingly, that the more we flirt or lust over others the less intimacy we enjoy with our partners.

Professor Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair said: “Love is a commitment mechanism, and there is less passion and desire in a relationship if a partner is more interested in others.”

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at or call 0207 782 4368 . You can WhatsApp us on 07810 791 502. We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.

Innumerable studies have gone into finding out 'reality of the male sex drive', but now a new study claims that men really are 'hornier' than women.

Roy F. Baumeister at Florida State University, Kathleen Catanese at a Midwestern college and Kathleen Vohs, a professor of marketing, set out to find the truth, reports Oxford University Press.

They approached the problem like this. Imagine two women (or two men for that matter), such that one of them has truly a stronger sex drive than the other. What differences in preferences and behaviour would you expect to see between the two of them?

After months of reading and compiling results, the answer was clear. There is a substantial difference, and men have a much stronger sex drive than women. To be sure, there are some women who have frequent, intense desires for sex, and there are some men who don't, but on average the men want it more.

Advertisement

Source: ANI

Advertisement

Tweet

Is there Anything Good About Men? It seems that women’s magazines ask this question almost every month, along with advice about reconciling sexual preferences between men and women. In the excerpt below, Roy F. Baumeister reveals the “reality of the male sex drive.”

The problem of recognizing the reality of the male sex drive was brought home to me in a rather amusing experience I had some years ago. I was writing a paper weighing the relative influence of cultural and social factors on sexual behavior, and the influence consistently turned out to be stronger on women than on men. In any scientific field, observing a significant difference raises the question of why it happens. We had to consider several possible explanations, and one was that the sex drive is milder in women than in men. Women might be more willing to adapt their sexuality to local norms and contexts and different situations, because they aren’t quite so driven by strong urges and cravings as men are.

When I brought this up in the paper as one possible theory, reviewers reacted rather negatively. They thought the idea that men have a stronger sex drive than women was probably some obsolete, wrong, and possibly offensive stereotype. I wasn’t permitted to make such a statement without proof, which they doubted could be found. And when I consulted the leading textbooks on sexuality, none of them said that women had a generally milder desire for sex than men. Some textbooks explicitly said that idea was wrong. One, by Janet Hyde and Richard DeLamater, openly speculated that women actually had a stronger sex drive than men, contrary to what I thought.

Two colleagues and I decided to see what information could be gleaned from all the published research studies we could find. This meant a long process of slogging through hundreds of scientific journal articles reporting scientific studies of sexual behavior. One colleague, Kathleen Catanese (now a professor of psychology at a Midwestern college) started out as a strong feminist with the party-line belief that there was no difference in sex drive. The other, Kathleen Vohs (now a professor of marketing), was undecided. My hunch was that men had the stronger sex drive. Thus, at the outset, we held an assortment of views, but we all decided we would just follow the data and revise our opinions as the evidence came in.

The task was considerable, and I at least was nagged by the fear that this point was so obvious that no one would want to publish our research. One colleague heard we were reviewing the literature to see whether men wanted sex more than women, and she commented acidly, “Of course they do. Everybody who’s ever had sex knows that!” Well, everybody, apparently, except the expert researchers on sexuality and authors of textbooks.

There is no single, clear measure of sex drive. So we approached the problem like this. Imagine two women (or two men for that matter), such that one of them has truly a stronger sex drive than the other. What differences in preferences and behavior would you expect to see between the two of them? For example, the one with the stronger sex drive would presumably think about sex more often; have more fantasies, desire, and actual sex more often; have more partners; masturbate more often; and devote more effort to having sex than the other. The reverse is quite implausible. That is, it is hard to imagine the woman with a weaker sex drive having more frequent sexual fantasies than the woman with the stronger sex drive.

And so we searched for studies that compared men and women on these types of behaviors.

After months of reading and compiling results, the answer was clear. There is a substantial difference, and men have a much stronger sex drive than women. To be sure, there are some women who have frequent, intense desires for sex, and there are some men who don’t, but on average the men want it more. Every marker we could think of pointed to the same conclusion. Men think about sex more often than women do. Men have more sexual fantasies, and these encompass more different acts and more different partners.

Men masturbate more than women – much more. Masturbation is considered by sex researchers to be one of the purest measures of sex drive, because it is not much constrained by external factors (such as the need to find a partner, or the risk of pregnancy or disease). Some people say that women feel guilty about masturbation, but that’s not what the data say, at least not any more. In fact, it’s mainly the (few) nonmasturbating men who associated masturbation with guilt. Nonmasturbating women generally say they just don’t feel any inclination to do it. They don’t need guilt to resist the impulse, because they aren’t resisting – because they don’t have the impulse.

There’s plenty more. Men take more risks and incur more costs for sex. (Remember President Clinton!) Men want sex more often than women, whether one is talking about young couples or people who have been married to the same person for forty years. Men also want more different partners than women want, and men like a greater variety of sex acts than women do.

Men initiate sex often and refuse it rarely. Women initiate it much more rarely and refuse it much more often than men. Given an opportunity for sex, men leap at it, while women say no. One classic study sent student research assistants out on campus to approach fairly attractive people (of the other gender) at random with the line, “I’ve been noticing you around campus and I think you’re attractive. Would you like to go to bed with me tonight?” More than three-quarters of the men said yes. Not a single woman did.

Women find it easier than men to go without sex. An adult woman who is between relationships can easily go for months, sometimes even years, hardly thinking of sex and not minding if she doesn’t have it. Men go nuts without sex (or at least some do). A man who loses his girlfriend will often start masturbating by the next day or two.

Even when both men and women make a heartfelt, sacred vow of chastity, the men find it much harder to keep than the woman. Catholic priests have much more sexual activity than the nuns, even though both have committed themselves to the single standard of complete abstinence and have backed this up with a sacred promise in the context of the most important beliefs and values in their lives.

In short, pretty much every study and every measure fit the pattern that men want sex more than women. It’s official: Men are hornier than women.

Roy F. Baumeister is the Eppes Eminent Professor of Psychology and head of the social psychology graduate program at Florida State University. The Institute for Scientific Information lists him among the handful of most cited (most influential) psychologists in the world. He is co-editor, with John Baer and James Kaufman, of Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will and author of The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life, and most recently Is there Anything Good About Men? How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men.